If Anna McNulty really wants to improve and transform herself, the first step is to become aware of the weaknesses which may be holding her back and preventing her evolution:
– her insatiable appetites
– her stubbornness
– her grimness
– her reluctance to change

Anna may experience discord in relationships. Although she is friendly and outgoing and commits herself to friendships and partnerships, she often finds it difficult to balance her own needs, desires, and goals with the objective reality of others and their individual desires and needs.

To understand and overcome this problem, she should accept the idea that every relationship follows more or less the same general scheme: a base of intimacy and an accomplishment or purpose apart from the relationship itself. If she succeeds in defining, through discussion and communication, what sort of intimate relationship she and her partners want to maintain and what accomplishment or purpose they hope to achieve, many conflicts will be avoided.

As we suggested earlier, Anna McNulty is endowed with great sensitivity and has profound aspirations, especially romantic ones. Nevertheless, her spirit is sometimes too delicate for her to have armored and structured herself for the constraints of life out there in the real world. Moreover, she sees little point in devoting herself to fulfilling the demands of practical reality, which strike her as rather futile and empty. Her escapes into her fantasy world give her the illusion of a much greater reward. She tends to gloss over her vision of other people, and when they reveal their imperfections and incompetence, she feels guilty for them and suffers from her own vulnerability and illusions. She would do well to try to be more selective about the people she associates with; when she is moving in a dream world, she attracts the kind of dishonest people who are likely to take advantage of her.